Had Girls Trip been Guys Trip instead, the comedy would have been quickly dismissed as
generic and derivative, with the laughs made up almost entirely from bathroom
humor and tasteless objectification of male sex organs. The single relevant
element of the production is the choice to have female characters the focus in
a sex comedy, following in the footsteps of Bridesmaids, Trainwreck and Rough
Night, but with a black cast. Girls Trip
is an equal opportunity piece of trash, but just because the vulgarity is
carried out by women doesn’t make this anything close to a feminist narrative,
and the casting of black actresses doesn’t mean the film has anything relevant
to say about diversity. Men are both the problems that the women spend much of
their time discussing, as well as the solution, even to the point of pairing
off a married woman with another man mere minutes after she condemns him for
his infidelity. While it is a good sign that movies about female minorities can
make money at the box office, they deserve far better than what Girls Trip has to offer.

By removing key
characters of color from the adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s Civil War-era
novel, Sophia Coppola has lost a key element of the original narrative, which
was more faithfully adapted in 1971. By deciding to shoot the film in
purposefully low light that is meant to look realistic in scenes of
candlelight, Coppola has made an ugly movie full of indecipherably dark scenes.
Endlessly pretentious and effortlessly dull for a majority of the run-time, The Beguiled still manages to be one of
the best films that Coppola has made in years, though this is not saying much
after enduring vapid qualities of both The
Bling Ring and Somewhere.

Sometimes horror
movies rely upon the stupidity of the characters, especially if there would be
no deaths without their mistakes. This can work, especially in the slaughtering
of sinful co-eds in slasher films, but even the protagonist displays some
restraint in those films. Wish Upon
forces a completely preventable premise upon its audience, made worse by the
fact that the main character has to act completely out of character just to
keep the plot moving.

I don’t think
anyone imagined that this franchise would still be alive and kicking in 2017
when the original Sniper film was
released in 1993, but somehow the sequels keep getting churned out. It was only
last year that Sniper: Ghost Shooter was
released, and yet we already have another direct-to-video sequel. Even more impressive is how often the original
stars have even returned to the series, with Sniper: Ultimate Kill including both Billy Zane and Tom Berenger in
supporting roles, despite the focus remaining on the next generation of sniper.